Sumer Erek: Ash
Seeds
As the title Ash Seeds would suggest, Erek's series of ash photographs
contemplate a dual perspective of the same substance. Ash could
be thought of as the result of destruction, a symbol of death, yet
it is also a rich fertiliser and so has the power of regeneration.
Common to each image is a female nude coated in ash.
The women are all in close-up, their torsos fill the frame becoming
monumental, often functioning as a landscape or a microcosm. The
intervention of water, fire and meat provide the elements essential
to support life.
The landscape-woman enacts her own creation myth. Her dusty corpse
grows mountains (Ash Summits); receives rain and is farmed (Ash
Seeds); accepts and roasts meat (Ash Flames); awakes (Ash Paint);
suffers (Ash Pain). In Ashland the body is resolved as a landscape
painting; the human's interpretation of her environment, and so
achieves intellect.
The bodies, sometimes white with dust, sometimes smeared with wet
ash, evoke tribal ritual and an intimacy with the earth which technology
divides us from. These images are simple yet mysterious. The processes
enacted are familiar yet surprising.
The torso is literally a factory performing the functions of digestion,
reproduction and respiration, yet in Ash Seeds its scale and scope
become infinite. In perhaps the most arresting sequence, Ash Flames,
a body thick with ashes ignites and then roasts a slab of meat.
The live flesh, the dead flesh, the ashes, the fire are strata
of a witty and iridescent barbecue.
Judy Clarkson 2004 |
independent
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georgian
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central 
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